Baby Babble

What makes a population lull? Slacker fathers

In this Business Week article, it is suggested that every woman—from North America to Australia to everywhere in between—should birth 2.1 babies in order to keep the population stable. This is simply the replacement rate. The U.S. sits right at that 2.1 average. But some eastern and southern European countries have seen a drop in births—less than 1.3 per woman—giving their population the appearance that it will be cut in half within 45 years.

Why the sudden decrease in births? Is it due to families’ lower incomes? Or women’s struggles to get back into the workplace after raising her children? Nope. Interestingly enough, researchers have discovered that the birth rate is directly related to the home participation of men.

“In societies where women do 75 percent or more of the housework and child care, they are less likely to have another child than in countries where fathers share the load.”

Well, that makes sense to me. Why would a woman want to have several kids with her “partner” if her “partner” requires a mommy, too?

How are things run in your household? If you have/had/are a husband who didn’t share household responsibilities, would this affect your decision to have more children?

What tops your list for employer family friendly policies?

Over at the the Work It Mom blog, blogger and working mom Karen Walrond created her Top Five list of things she’d love to see companies offer to their employees who are working parents. In short, they are:

1) No time clocks (flextime)

2) Tools to work away from the office (laptops, mobile phones, Blackberries, etc.)

3) Family Friendly activities at the workplace

4) on-site day care (child care)** and

5) maternity leave for all moms.

It’s a short little list, but surely is met with a long list of objections from many employers.  In #5, Walrond points out that for adoptive parents and the tiny percentage of women who may have had to use a surrogate mother to carry the child, maternity policies where women are classified as short-term disabled after giving birth may not apply to them. The  Family Medical Leave Act may be of some help, but it is unpaid.  All the rest on her list are self-explanatory.

Which of these would be #1 on your list to get from your employer?

Which of these do you think an employer can reasonably object to?

Write us by clicking onto "Comment" or "Comments" just below and it will walk you through how to enter your opinion.

** It is editorial policy of The Baby Babble to refer to "Day Care" as "Child Care"--since care givers are taking care of children, not days.  Does anybody have a comment about this?

What is your "worth" as a mom and otherwise?

The moms over at New Jersey Moms Blog have been pondering their stay-at-home lives with their children and wondering if they're doing the right thing--not for their children, but for themselves. Will they be "out-dated" if and when they attempt to return to the workforce?  Will they be employable if they lose their husbands suddenly? Is their own self-worth tied to their child-raising skills or their employment skills? How much time and money should be invested in keeping their own job skills intact?

These are weighty issues with, of course, no easy answers.  Is there a new mom out there who hasn't struggled with these questions? We'd welcome your thoughts here. How do you weigh your financial needs, your job skills, your child's needs? How do you balance things out with your work and your husband's? In short, how do you *think* about this whole parenting thing--now and into your future?

As food-for-thought, you might click on over to the Mom's Salary Wizard and see just how much your parenting tasks might be worth out on the open job market.

Write your thoughts here by clicking onto "comments" just below.

News flash: Working women don't get to spend time with their kids

A new CareerBuilder.com survey has uncovered an astonishing fact: Moms who work full time are missing quality time with their kids. Well, who needed an official survey to tell us that?!  (See a CNN report on this survey.)

With the cost of everything rising, it’s not uncommon that both parents in a two-parent household must work outside of the home to pay the bills. But what’s shocking is what the survey revealed: Nearly one-third of the 1,124 moms included in the survey say they spend less than three hours per day with their children. And nearly a quarter of them report having missed three or more significant events in their child's life in the last year. The survey offered further shock when it discovered that 44 percent of the moms say they’d willingly take a pay cut if it meant they got to spend more time with their kids.

It seems there should be a compromise here. Working is necessary to pay the bills, but shouldn’t your family be the most important thing? Even if your employer isn’t up-front about flexible working arrangements, it’s time you start asking about them. Do you really want your child care provider to raise your kids?

Care to comment? Click onto "comments" just below.

Bring Baby to Work Day? Every day?

A bit of a trend has emerged with some companies allowing employees to bring their babies to work with them, as a child care arrangement option, as written about in the WorkItMom blog, USA Today and with statistics provided by the Parenting in the Workplace Institute and Babies in the Workplace.

Some 80 companies, at least, have adopted formal policies that allow employees to bring their young babies into the office. Some allow the babies to come to work until they are mobile--around nine months or so. Some provide private offices for new parents, to keep the possible baby noises from disturbing others. Some fear other employees will be resentful or distracted, but others have found that having a baby around boosts the morale of everyone. "You can't be in a bad mood when there is a baby there," said one company spokeswoman. In addition, company loyalty may rise with these arrangements. Still, it's not for everyone. Probably very small, cramped offices wouldn't work, or a colicky/fussy baby might best be elsewhere. What do you think? Take our two mini-polls below. If you care to comment, do so by clicking onto "comments" just below. Thank you!

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Here at The Baby Babble, we know there are a lot of "Mommy Blogs" out there that you may be reading in addition to ours. We'd love to hear your nominations for which ones you like the best and read the most. With your help, we'll build a list of links to those popular blogs, and you'll be able to access them here, too. Just drop us a line, using the "Comments" button just below. Tell us the name of the blog, the web address for the blog (URL), and a brief note about why you like it. You'll be spreading the good news, helping other parents like yourself, and helping us at the same time. Thank you.

Do you feel guilty when you leave work at the appropriate time?

While doing a little web cruising on work and family issues, we stumbled upon a commenter on a Wall Street Journal article: "Dealing with 'The Walk of Shame' at Work," in which one woman said she used to feel guilty if she left work at 5:30 p.m.  Good Lord, shouldn't everyone be leaving work at 5:30 p.m? Anyway, that comment led to much discussion about work hours, "face time" and family time. 

It seems odd to us here at The Baby Babble that working parents feel guilty when they actually work 8 hours a day at a paying job and then go home to their other full-time job--parenting. After all, 8 hours a day is a full-time job in this country.  More hours than that and, well, you're volunteering, aren't you?

This is not to judge those who feel guilty. It's to judge those employers or bosses who feel that more hours are required--of anyone and everyone.  Sure, salary is salary, but working longer than 8 hours a day is, no doubt, not very healthy for any individual and probably not that great for company morale. When did we lose sight of a 40-hour-work-week?

Did you cut back your hours to parent?

Did you turn down a promotion or a more demanding new job because of your children (child)?

Write us here with your stories of work life and work hours. Click onto "comments" just below and fill us in.

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New job network for professionals seeking flex-time

Blogger Kathleen Wiant over at the On Balance blog was a full-time employee who worked at home for part of the time when her first child was born. Later, after having five (yes, five!) kids, she had been at home full-time, but really wanted and needed to be out in the professional workforce with flexible working hours. After a lengthy search, she discovered that she was usually over-qualified for the jobs she did manage to find. Finally she teamed up with her former boss, who had begun her own venture--NeedleStackJobs.com, a website devoted to helping professionals find employment and projects that both used their skills and met their needs for work flexibility.

Here at The Baby Babble we checked out the site, which is relatively new. It works like other job search sites, where the user can enter certain criteria and, with luck, find jobs in the right location. The site seemed a little short on possibilities, but it is new, so we're hopeful this will become a great resource for parents of young children, and baby boomers nearing retirement who may want or need meaningful work with flexible scheduling.

What would your ideal work arrangement be as a parent (besides the obvious--being independently wealthy and not having to work)?

Take our mini-poll below.

The United States--home of "family hostile" work policies

In a recent article in Human Resource Executive Online, the United States is singled out as having particularily unfriendly family policies in the workplace, so much so that one expert has called it a "family-hostile" environment. The article focuses on a recent report from a group called The International Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (IOECD) entitled Babies and Bosses, Reconciling Work and Family Life. The report states that the development of good family friendly policies in the workplace would go a long way towards eliminating childhood poverty around the world.  The United States, according to the report, has a child poverty rate of 18 percent, while the average among member countries of the  IOECD is just 10 percent. Only Mexico has a higher child poverty rate than the United States, at 21 percent.

Family friendly polices make it possible for women to earn enough to support their families, for both parents to stay in the workforce after having children and/or provide paid time off for a brief period of time. Policies may also help parents find and afford quality child care options.

"The major reason the United States has such a startlingly high level of childhood poverty is that this country has fewer family supports for working parents than any other industrialized country," says Joan C. Williams, distinguished professor of law at the University of California's Hastings College of the Law and director of the Center for WorkLife Law."We have a poisonous combination of family-hostile public policies and extremely long working hours [for full-time work] that disallows [primarily] mothers' independence and ability to care for their children."

When it comes to great work life/family policies in the workplace, the Scandinavian countries and France have it all over the U.S., according to the report.

Do you see the link between unfriendly polices and children living in poverty in the United States? Write us here with your thoughts, using the "comments" button just below.  How did having children affect your financial status?

Babies around the office water cooler

Time Magazine reports on a recent phenomenon--companies allowing parents to bring their infants to the workplace.  Is seems like a rather ideal situation for the parents--no trials trying to find expensive, quality child care; opportunities to bond with baby and easy access to feeding.  This article suggests that at least 70 companies nationwide have policies allowing baby to come to work. And, it's probably way more than that. Many companies make customized arrangements based on individual employees. Fussy infants and particular jobs won't lend themselves very well to this arrangement, but in many situations it really can work. Co-workers or bosses may think of the babies as distractions, but, as one expert points out, it's probably not more distracting than "talk about 'Dancing with the Stars' or your weekend." 

In fact, preliminary studies show there are very few problems with baby-at-work arrangements. Babies, at times, can be a morale booster, some found.

What do you think? As a parent, would you bring your baby to work? As a co-worker, would you mind if there was a baby in the next cubicle? Write us with your thoughts, using the "comment" button just below.

Bring Your Child to Work Day--Everyday?

Here's an interesting, alleged trend from an article in the Boston Globe--bringing your children to work, not just one day a year but as a general practice.  This article says that "there is a wave" of businesses allowing parents to bring young children to work regularly, or at least to bring them when child care arrangements fall through or school is out. Some limit the practice to infants only, prior to their ability to get up and move.   

It seems there are only about 85 large employers around the country offering this benefit and I'm willing to bet the numbers will stay quite low. One woman profiled in this article gained permission to do this not only from her boss, but from her co-workers as well.  This seems entirely appropriate, since not everybody would be that thrilled with having a crying infant or a child in the height of the Terrible Twos sitting at the next cubicle.

Wouldn't it make more sense to offer paid parental leave during this early stage of a child's life? Or, perhaps more practical from a financial standpoint, let parent and child just stay home and work.  With today's wonderful technology--email, web cams and webcasting, skype, video presentations, etc. why, really, does anybody have to show up at an office anyway?

What do you think? Would you bring your child to work? Would you want others to?